The Chinese emperor Qianlong abdicated so as not to reign longer than his grandfather.
In 1795 he stepped down after 60 years out of respect for Kangxi, who had ruled for 61.
More amazing facts
- 1718 Blackbeard held the people of a whole city hostage — and asked for a chest of medicine.
- 1718 · 1727 Blackbeard and Isaac Newton were contemporaries.
- 1720 Pirates had their own injury insurance.
- 1720 Two women pirates escaped the gallows because they were pregnant.
- 1720 Isaac Newton lost a fortune in a stock bubble.
- 1721 Boston learned smallpox inoculation from an enslaved African man. Onesimus told his owner, the minister Cotton Mather, that this was how people at home protected themselves, and in the 1721 epidemic the inoculated died far less often.